Nowadays, taking pictures of a player on a golf course or the like is usually done by a professional or amateur photographer taking a strip comprising approximately 10 frames at the starting hole or another member shooting a video of the player.
When taking pictures of a player, however, it is difficult for a nonaffiliated person to come into the course in view of the safety of players and the photographer himself and because of other reasons. On the other hand, having another player take pictures tends to disturb his concentration on the game.
Furthermore, in many cases pictures of a mere 10 frames or so taken at a starting hole are insufficient to be used for studying the player's swing and so on and serve no more than as souvenir pictures.
In addition, as the player often wants to study his swing throughout the game, taking pictures only at a starting hole is not wholly satisfactory, showing how good or bad his swings are only for at the starting hole.
Examples of conventional picture-taking apparatuses include one disclosed in Japanese Patent Laying -open No. 191133/1988 which calls for taking pictures of a subject by means of transmitting signals from a transmitting means attached to the subject and receiving these signals using a receiving means, another disclosed in Japanese Utility Model Laying -open No. 117625/1989 which means attached to the subject and causing a picture-taking device to follow the direction of the strongest signal, and another disclosed in Japanese Patent Laying-open No. 134351/1981 which calls for following a subject by means of a transmitting means attached to the subject and shooting for a specified period of time.
However, the configurations according to Japanese Patent Laying -open No. 191133/1988 and Japanese Utility Model Laying -open No. 117625/1989 merely call for causing a picture-taking device to follow a subject to take pictures thereof, and the configuration according to Japanese Patent Laying -open No. 134351/1989, too, is to take pictures of a subject for a specified period of time by means of simply orienting a picture-taking device in such a direction as to follow the subject. In other words, all of these configurations are capable only of taking pictures of a subject without consideration of the distance to the subject. Therefore, pictures are always taken under the same conditions, regardless of the distance between the subject and the picture-taking device, and often come out with unsatisfactory results, such as, for example, the subject is too small for the size of a frame or too large to fit completely in a frame.
In order to solve the above problems, a subject of the invention is to provide a picture-taking method and apparatus which is capable of reliably taking visual images of a subject while the subject is moving, ensuring an image of the subject within a frame maintains a nearly constant proportion in size.